Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (31 page)

O
ne time I heard a speaker give a brilliant presentation of a passage of Scripture. On the way out of the auditorium, I overheard two people talking.

“Well,” one of them was asking, “what did you think of that?”

The other person shrugged. “Not very much. He didn’t do a blessed thing but explain the Bible.”

Nothing but explain the Bible? Why, that’s the highest compliment I can imagine. After all, the primary task of any teacher of Scripture is to explain what the text means. You see, it is impossible to apply the Word of God until you understand it. In fact, the better you understand it, the better you can apply it. That’s why David prayed, “Give me understanding, and I will keep your law and obey it with all my heart” (Psalm 119:34,
NIV
).

Acting on what God has said assumes that you understand what He has said. That’s why the second major step in firsthand Bible study is the step of Interpretation. Here you ask and answer the question, What does it mean?

Acts 8 records the story of Philip. Philip was the Billy Graham of his day. He preached the gospel in Samaria, and the entire region responded. But one day
the Spirit of God said to him, “Go south on the road—the desert road—from Jerusalem to Gaza” (v. 26).

“What?” he could have argued. “I’m a metropolitan man. I only do big crusades. I don’t go in for any one-on-one stuff.”

But instead he heads south, and en route he meets a man, an Ethiopian eunuch. Actually, he is the secretary of the treasury for his country. And they get involved in a conversation. The official has been reading a passage of Scripture.

So Philip asks him, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

Imagine boarding a plane, sitting down next to someone reading
Time
magazine, and asking, “Hey, do you understand what you’re reading?” I suspect the person would give you a portion of his mind that he couldn’t afford to lose.

But Philip must have known how to ask that question, because the man answers, “Well, how could I, unless someone guides me?” (v. 31).

Mark it well: this man had a copy of the Scriptures, but he needed help in understanding them. He was deeply involved in the process of Interpretation. That’s clear from the perceptive question he asks after reading the passage: “Tell me please, who is the prophet talking about? Himself, or someone else?” (v. 34).

Philip helped the man gain insight into what the text meant. And after he understood it, he was able to respond in faith. Verse 39 says he went home “rejoicing.” So in a real sense, the step of Interpretation helped to open Africa to the gospel.

Every book of Scripture has a message, and that message can be understood. Do you ever wonder sometimes whether the Bible is just a giant riddle? God intended it as a revelation. Second Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is
profitable
” (italics added). That is, it has purpose, it has meaning. God is not playing a game of hide-and-seek with you. He doesn’t invite you into His Word only to puzzle and confound you. He’s far more interested that you understand it than you are.

But the question is, what do we mean by “meaning”? Let me give you an illustration. I happen to be partially color-blind, so I can’t easily distinguish
between greens and blues. Suppose you showed me a sweater and said, “Prof, I just love this blue sweater.” We would both be looking at the same sweater, but the color you see would not be the same as the color I see.

Something like that happens all the time in biblical interpretation. Two people will look at the same verse and come up with two completely different interpretations. In fact, they may be opposing interpretations. Can they both be correct? Not if the laws of logic apply to Scripture.

But unfortunately, many people today have decided that the laws of logic do not apply to Scripture. To them, it doesn’t really matter whether you see the text as blue and I see it as green. In fact, it doesn’t really matter what color the text actually is. For them, the meaning of the text is not in the text, it’s in their response to the text. And everyone is free to have his or her own response. Meaning becomes purely subjective.

Now there are good reasons Christians may disagree on the interpretation of a passage. We’ll come back to that in the next chapter. But if we’re to have any hope of interpreting God’s Word accurately, we’ve got to start with a fundamental premise: “Meaning” is not our subjective thoughts read into the text but God’s objective truth read out of the text. As someone has well said, the task of Bible study is to “think God’s thoughts after Him.” He has a mind, and He has revealed it in His Word.

The miracle is that He used human authors to do so. Working through their personalities, their circumstances, and their concerns, the Holy Spirit superintended the crafting of a document. And each of the human authors—God’s coauthors, we might call them—had a specific message in mind as he recorded his portion of the text.

That’s why I like to refer to the step of Interpretation as the re-creation process. We’re attempting to stand in the author’s shoes and re-create his experience—to think as he thought, to feel as he felt, and to decide as he decided. We’re asking, What did this mean to him? before we ever ask, What does it mean to us?

So how does Interpretation relate to Observation? Recall that in Observation we asked and answered the question, What do I see? That was the foundational
phase of Bible study. Having done that, we need to move on to Interpretation, where we develop the superstructure.

You see, in Observation we excavate. In Interpretation we erect. And buildings are always determined by their foundations. The more substantial the foundation, the more substantial the superstructure.

Imagine that we went downtown in your city and saw workers digging a foundation. In fact, they’d been at it for two-and-a-half years. Then they pour a slab across it, and invite the public to a dedication ceremony. We show up—only to find a chicken coop in the middle of the slab. We would automatically ask, “What gives? Why such a massive foundation for such a minuscule building?”

In the same way, the quality of your interpretation will always depend on the quality of your observation. It is impossible to understand what a writer means until you notice what the writer says. Therefore, to observe well is to interpret well. You always need to observe with a view to interpreting (and eventually to applying) the Scripture. Observation is never an end in itself but always a means to an end.

But the question remains: Why must we interpret Scripture? Why can’t we just open the Word, read what we’re supposed to do, and then do it? Why do we have to go to so much trouble to understand the text? The answer is that time and distance have thrown up barriers between us and the biblical writers, which block our understanding. We need to appreciate what those roadblocks are. They are not insurmountable, but they are substantial. Let’s look at a number of them.

Have you ever learned a foreign language? If so, you know that learning the words is not enough. You have to learn the mind-set, the culture, the worldview of those who speak it if you really want to understand what they are saying.

In the same way, when it comes to the Bible, we have some excellent translations from the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic languages in which it was originally written. Even so, the English text leaves us a long way from a complete understanding. That’s why the process of Interpretation involves the use
of a Bible dictionary and similar resources. We have to go back and recover the shades of meaning that translated words alone cannot convey.

These are closely related to the problems of language because language is always culture-bound. The Bible is the product and the presentation of cultures that are dramatically different from our own—and also different from each other. To appreciate what is going on in Scripture, we have to reconstruct the cultural context in areas of communication, transportation, trade, agriculture, occupations, religion, perceptions of time, and so on.

This is where archaeology proves so helpful. I’ll suggest some sources to consult in
chapter 34
.